The tech that the US Post Office gave us | Hacker News Reader

The tech that the US Post Office gave us

theverge.com

75 points01-_-21 comments

I have been very pleasantly surprised by the usefulness of the USPS Informed Delivery [1] program which emails me pictures of the mail parcels arriving in the next day or two.

> Today, the USPS’s OCR technology can read handwritten mail at nearly 98 percent accuracy, while machine-printed addresses bump its accuracy to 99.5 percent.

> [...] it first started using a handwriting recognition tool in 1999. The USPS is currently in the middle of a 10-year modernization plan, which includes investments in technology, such as AI. However, the plan has faced criticism for raising the price of stamps and causing service disruptions in some areas.

$0.78 to send a letter or postcard anywhere in the USA seems so cheap that I don't think the "rising cost of stamps" could ever even cross my mind. I'm aware that it does matter to some people, though.

I will, however, be glad if it becomes too expensive for spam mailers.

[1] https://www.usps.com/manage/informed-delivery.htm

Spam mailers don't pay the first-class rate. They get a discount and they must pre-sort their mail by carrier route. Sadly, junk mail is what keeps the postal service afloat. I note that they are also apparently selling ads on the informed delivery website.

The usps change of address form is a folded pamphlet with one section for the form and 2-3 for advertisments. More ads than paperwork

>I will, however, be glad if it becomes too expensive for spam mailers.

Which I assume still subsidizes first class mail.

Honestly, it doesn't bother me a lot. Some I even find useful and the rest is quick to toss in the trash. There's actually a lot less than there sed to be with the decline in mailed catalogs and the like.

> Today, the USPS’s OCR technology can read handwritten mail at nearly 98 percent accuracy

That seems quite low compared to other uses of AI. Imagine a self driving car taking a decision every second with 98 percent accuracy. After a minute of driving there would be a 70% probability of making at least one bad decision.

Yeah, but my penmanship is awful, and I'm not alone.

However, machine printed addresses are the norm, and address barcodes for large mailers are very common. Manual assistance on 2% of handwritten mail isn't that much manual assistance.

You need not suffer spam in your mailbox if you’ve got $4. Lest I repeat myself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36131222

Actually, now it's now $6. :-)

That seems unbelievablly cheap and it appears to last for 10 years. Thanks for the link.

Whoops, I’ll update my spiel. And you can do it online now! Why, back in my day…

The issue is when you want to send say 120 wedding invitations, that 78 cents adds up. Corpos get Pitney Bowes mail meters which print the barcodes and have a slightly cheaper rate, but the post office doesnt provide this convenience to consumers as far as I know.

Postage price increases over the past hundred years generally match inflation to within a couple percentage points. So agreed: it's a very low price for an impressive and efficient service.

My undergrad university was involved in developing hand-writing recognition for the postal service when I was there in the late 80s / early 90s (https://cedar.buffalo.edu/hwai/hwai_home.html). They brought in a ton of grant money, and even hired undergrads to help with the research. My roommate worked for them when we were seniors, and I was envious of the fact he had access to his own sparcstation. This was in a time where the undergrad labs just had VT-220 terminals connected to a shared and overloaded sparc server.

I posted this on HN back in 2023, reposting now because I don't think this article goes far enough:

I’ll make the bold claim that the following industries / companies would not exist without the USPS:

The Airline Industry: In the early days of American aviation, air transportation was unproven and not financially viable, until the USPS built the necessary infrastructure and gave contracts to airlines to allow them financial feasibility… starting in 1918! [1]

Machine Learning: In 1989 Yann LeCun wrote his seminal paper “Backpropagation Applied to Handwritten ZIP Code Recognition”, which used the USPS’s data set and has today become the hello world of machine learning tasks. More importantly this is the first commercial or industrial application of machine learning. [2]

Netflix: Before Streaming became a thing, Netflix was shipping DVDs via the USPS. The Postal Service adapted its processes and equipment to make this financially feasible, supporting Netflix through its transition to streaming. [3]

Amazon: Early Amazon was only a book vendor, the USPS offered special rates for books that made it possible for Bezos to be profitable from his garage … in 1994, thus birthing the behemoth it is today. [4]

Chickens: okay, not really. But the USPS ships millions of pounds of live chickens and other animals each year! [5]

[1] https://www.history.com/news/us-aviation-airmail-passenger-f...

[2] http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/publis/pdf/lecun-89e.pdf

[3] https://www.zdnet.com/article/u-s-postal-service-to-netflix-...

[4] https://faq.usps.com/s/article/What-is-Media-Mail-Book-Rate

[5] https://pe.usps.com/text/pub52/pub52c5_008.htm

https://archive.is/CTEtQ

I remember reading an article eons ago about the tech used for OCR at USPS in what I'm pretry sure was Wired. If I remember correctly, on each sorting line they were using something like 10 dual or quad 200 MHz Pentium Pro systems to accomplish the ultra high speed recognition that they required. That amount of computing power was absolutely mind bending to me at the time, now days it's laughable, a Raspberry Pi would blow it out of the water.

My parents in the late 80s or early 90s had a computer with some low MB number for storage. Not sure if hard drive or what, but it's wild thinking about how far consumer stuff has come too.

Internet speed too. I remember my mom complaining whenever anyone emailed her pictures because it tied up the internet/phone line for half an hour while they were downloading.

Our first home computer was a 386SX with a 300MB hard drive and 4MB of RAM, which seemed amazingly capacious at the time.

if only we kept up with that innovation...enterprise red tape is such a travesty

What happened?

(Mostly separate: Not american, however I do feel the need to point out that The Postman (1997) featuring Kevin Costner is criminally underrated.)

The internet, mostly. People used to pay to send messages, which provided a budget source for R&D. Nowadays people expect to be able to send messages for free, keeping that R&D money of the past for themselves (which translates to pouring it into real estate).

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